“The nighttime sky is all about yesterday”
– Robin Schwartz, Night Swimming
Parked there, in the silent fade-out
of a motel’s parking lot, three cars:
a 57’ Fairlaine, its front grill, ridged
with five long metal lines and taillights
that resembled a startled vireo’s eyes;
a 66’ Oldsmobile Cutlass, its face
squinted, and chomping fresh silver,
and a 1973 Buick Electa, its rear end,
slim-finned, and rectangular taillights
swallowed into the long bumper.
Something magical in these cars –
angels creeping past them; summer’s
fertile design – at the outskirts of
everything; these cars, like chapels.…
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There is a chug in her lungs
put there by robot musicians
who told her she composed
of machinery, but never of girl.
I learn to rebuild instruments
Of more honey and flesh designs.
She is beauty, she is girl, she
is more than a piece of machine —
She is a piece of a red meat
topped in the sweetest cut
of pepper. Fat juices of her
deserve to run down creamy chins —
She rebuilds herself —
converts liquid fuel to blood,
and oil to hemoglobin.
She doesn’t know anatomy
but she knows his roommate,
flesh — the huge metropolis
selling body parts on street markets.
We buy the rest of her from a cart,
glitches of limbs wrapped in
peach and milk until she is skin
tumbling down bone like an avalanche.…
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At the funeral home, sad figures murmur
patting one another on the back, gently
the way we soothe children
gripping each other’s hands, reluctant to let go
then moving on to the next
as if underwater
in no hurry to say good-bye
to our casketed friend
his cooled hands folded, a crucifix on his chest
a still life framed in black and white,
a boxed gift nested in tissue paper.
And why stop there?…
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A glacier, then this.
A mangled mind is nothing
compared to the ice-graze on this rock.
All the people who ever stood on it,
even the ones who threw themselves off,
all the scars that they humped to get on top
are nothing compared to ice-melt.
Some of us worry about ice melting,
about what it means. Here, they say
if the ice didn’t melt, there’d still be something
to throw ourselves off, something to marvel at.
‘At least that’s something,’ they say, not knowing
how else to respond to a mind so mangled
it would take a falling glacier
to finally scrape it clean.
– Emma Croker…
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On the eve, age comes crashing
like a furious wave against
the shoreline of my thoughts –
the receding hairline of indolence,
the growing gut of greed, half-spent,
half-endured, as catcalls rise
from the gallery, and I am speared
upon a crescendo of longing.
We bid welcome to this new generation of thought.
The unborn children are squealing at the font
of our loins, that fear infects
like a cancer, noting
the ages I’ve reached
and bodies I’ve spurned
without ever creating something greater
than myself.
Wisdom refuses to descend; the old
goat beard growing, but shaking no pearls
from its wiry form. The curved blacks
of my inheritance not permitting
rescue or relief from the
misanthropic tendencies
that echo still like rung bells from my core.…
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The world is around again,
knocking on the door.
I pull on the chain and
open in it.
I am trying.
She is beautiful and
I let her in.
She says that starting
again is hard.
I agree over wine.
I don’t drink wine,
I am trying.
I work my way out of
the cocoon. She says
that it would be a good
rule not to talk about
our exes. I tell her that
it sounds good to me.
We kiss, letting the movie
play in the background.
I move forward, and
she pulls back.
She says that starting
over is hard.
Through the wine I agree.
– Pigpen Madigan…
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And then there’s that thing you do where
you swing by a rope from a tree
and magically disappear
without announcing if you will reappear
or not, and everyone left standing
asks, “Where’s Ben?”, some claiming
there’s nobody by that name in our databases,
then suddenly you’re on display in a box
in a strange room filled with solemn organs
and everyone is bringing you flowers.
So we’re left wandering around from place
to place thinking if a glass is raised that somehow
you’ll rise up through the floor or start
laughing at us from behind a curtain.
Of course, this never happens but we find ourselves
on tenterhooks, thinking we’ve caught a glimpse
of you.. lucidly there.. hazily not here.…
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